BEYOND FIRE

HOW TO ACHIEVEELECTRIC COOKING

AuthorsToby D. Couture (E3 Analytics)Dr. David Jacobs (IET - International Energy Transition GmbH)

ContributorsEco Matser and Harry Clemens (Hivos), Anna Skowron (WFC), and Joseph Thomas (E3 Analytics)

Presented to:World Future Council Lilienstraße 5-922095 HamburgGermany

Anna SkowronProject Manager Climate Energy

HivosRaamweg 162596 HL, The HagueThe Netherlands

Eco MatserProgram Manager Climate & Energy

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BEYOND FIRE HOW TO ACHIEVE ELECTRIC COOKING

May 2019

1 This individual provided a review as an individual scientist and the views expressed do not necessarily represent

the official position of the U.S. National Institutes of Health or Department of Health and Human Services.

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PEER REVIEWERS

Dr. Ashlinn Quinn, health scientist Household Air Pollution Investigation

Network (HAPIN) and Clean Cooking Implementation Science Network

(ISN) Fogarty International Center, U.S. National Institutes of Health..1

Dipal Chandra Barua, WFC Councilor, Co-founder of the Grameen Bank,

Founding Managing Director of the Grameen Shakti, Founder and

Chairman of the Bright Green Energy Foundation, President of the South

Asian Network for Clean Energy (StANCE).

Estomih Sawe, Chief Executive Officer and Director, TaTEDO,

Centre for Sustainable Energy Services

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“For almost two decades we have inadvertently

narrowed the debate of clean cooking to just

cook stoves. We need to look at the sources of

energy and clean fuels”

Kandeh Yumkella

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Achieving sustainable cooking is one of the great challenges of our time. An estimated 4 million premature deaths are caused each year by indoor air pollution caused by existing cooking practices still widespread in many parts of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa (WHO 2018). In Africa alone, the African Development Bank (AfDB) estimates that over 600,000 deaths per year are caused by existing cooking practices, the majority of which are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa (AfDB 2017).

The difficulty of finding cost-effective substitutes for traditional cooking fuels, most notably wood and charcoal, is made even more challenging by a range of cultural, behavioral and other factors that hinder the adoption of alternatives (Brown et al. 2017). Hundreds of millions of citizens worldwide have rarely if ever known any other form of cooking than traditional firewood and charcoal: this makes the adoption of alternatives a slow and often piecemeal process.

Over the past three decades, the majority of the focus in the cooking sector in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa has been on promoting improved cook stove technologies rather than on a fundamental transition of the underlying energy sources or fuels being used; this can be seen in the many of the national energy strategies recently developed, notably in sub-Saharan Africa (AfDB 2015; GACC 2016; ECREEE 2014). While the promotion of more efficient cookstoves remains an important interim solution and has delivered impressive results in certain countries, this report argues that focusing on improved cookstoves is neither a truly long-term

nor a truly sustainable solution to the challenge of cooking.

In light of these various interrelated challenges, this second edition of the Beyond Fire report sets out to build on the report’s first edition, which was originally published in 2016. This revised edition draws on new data and analysis to provide an update on how the economics of cooking with electricity in a stand-alone solar home system (SHS) as well as in a mini-grid context have evolved since then.

Clearly, overcoming the economic cost barrier is only part of the challenge: sustainable cooking technologies must be well adapted to individual communities’ way of life, and must be able to be easily integrated with prevailing cooking habits (Goodwin et al. 2014; Ekouevi 2014; Diehl et al. 2018). This means that the transition to other fuel types, whether electricity or otherwise, is likely to be a gradual process, underscoring the need to increase efforts to accelerate this transition now. Raising awareness of the alternatives, and better adapting solutions to people’s actual behaviors and cooking preferences, is critical.

In order to provide a comprehensive comparison of existing cooking options and of alternative cooking pathways, this report calculates the costs range for cooking with various different appliances and presents them in hanging bar charts in order to provide a snapshot of their relative cost-competitiveness. As can be seen, the costs of cooking with electricity both in mini-grid contexts and via solar home systems is now well within the range of costcompetitiveness of other cooking

https://www.worldfuturecouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/WFC_BeyondFire_web-version.pdf

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alternatives, a significant improvement from three years ago when the first edition was published. Also, similar to the first edition, this report finds that biogas-based cooking remains an economically attractive option, particularly for households with livestock or other suitable feedstocks.

A key improvement of this revised edition is that it sheds light on the tremendous cost-saving potential of using higher efficiency cooking appliances, in particular appliances like slow cookers and pressure cookers:

• Over a one-hour cooking period, a pressure cooker uses approximately one quarter (¼) of the electricity of an electric hot plate.

• Over a 4-hour cooking period, the gains increase further: a pressure cooker is twice as efficient as a slow cooker, six (6) times as efficient as an induction stove, and fully seven (7) times as efficient as an electric hot plate.

• In terms of costs, there is currently a 3-to-4-fold cost differential between a solar home system dimensioned for use with high-efficiency cooking appliances versus one that is dimensioned for use either with hotplates or induction stoves.

Given the limited financial resources available to most households currently cooking with firewood and charcoal, it is therefore critical to focus on deploying high-efficiency end-use appliances, despite their slightly higher upfront cost, as the system-level cost savings pay for themselves multiple times over.

In light of these substantial cost savings, using high-efficiency end-use appliances has the potential to lead to a similar “inflection point” as the emergence of LED lighting technologies on the off-grid solar sector.

The figure below provides a summary of current cost ranges, in EUR/GJ, of the various cooking options considered within the report.

COST RANGES OF VARIOUS COOKING TECHNOLOGIES (Per Person, Per Day, in EUR), 2019

FIGURE ES1:

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There are two main reasons why the revised cost analysis has seen such a significant improvement in the economic viability of electricity-based options:

First, the cost of both solar modules and batteries has come down significantly;

since early 2016, the costs of solar and storage systems have come down by between 30-50%, and continue to decline as markets scale-up and technologies improve;

Second, this analysis applies an updated methodology:

in particular, it moves away from the 1 GJ per person per year benchmark in terms of final energy use, and models much more precisely the actual electricity consumption of different end-use appliances. Instead of needing 308 – 397kWh per person per year of electricity, as assumed in the first edition, this revised analysis finds that the per person electricity consumption when using a higher efficiency slow cooker or pressure cooker ranges from 61 – 131kWh. Such energy efficiency savings make it possible to significantly reduce the overall size (and cost) of both the solar panels and the battery bank required to enable electric cooking.

These two changes recast the economics of cooking in a new and far more competitive light than the first edition.

One key finding that emerges from this updated cost analysis is that cooking with electricity (whether with solar home systems or in a mini-grid context) using high-efficiency appliances can even make cooking cheaper than what many households currently spend on firewood and charcoal. The World Bank’s bottom-up research from across Sub-Saharan Africa indicate that households spend on average between EUR 1 – EUR 31/month on cooking fuels (World Bank 2014).

With slow cookers and pressure cookers enabling household cooking costs of between EUR 15 and 21/month for SHS and between EUR 3.56 – 9.53/month for mini-grids, the economics of cooking with high efficiency cooking appliances are becoming increasingly compelling.

It is hoped that this revised analysis helps put electric cooking more firmly on the map.

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BEYOND FIRE: 6 STEPS TO ACHIEVE SUSTAINABLE COOKING

Governments need to set clear goalsto transition away from firewood and charcoal. The current energy strategies being developed by national governments and donor community for most of Africa and Asia are not doing enough to drive a meaningful transition toward sustainable cooking solutions. Current strategies still largely focus on improved cookstoves and the build-out of LPG infrastructure, failing to recognize the tremendous potential of alternative cooking solutions such as renewable electricity. By focusing largely on improved cookstoves, the international community might contribute to further entrenching technological path dependencies which might be a barrier for the de-carbonization of the cooking sector in the long-run. In order to make meaningful progress toward sustainable cooking, governments and donors will need to commit to far more ambitious goals, including clear strategies, more research on behavioral, cultural, and willingness-to-pay issues, as well as financing resources.

Stakeholders spanning governments,foundations, donors, investors andothers involved in financing projects in the cooking sector need to allocate more resources to support the availability of pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) contracts. Such contracts convert the high upfront cost of investments into smaller, more affordable payments that can be made on a regular basis (e.g. monthly or bi-monthly). A greater focus on providing affordable consumer finance, including more local currency financing and longer loan tenors, is critical to support the transition toward sustainable cooking.

Governments should introduce policies and incentives to reduce upfront costs. This can involve targeted grants to encourage adoption and foster economies of scale; it can also involve other policies to help bridge the cost gap, such as “feebates” (e.g. additional fees on certain items such as air conditioning units or automobiles that are allocated to support rebates on other technologies, in this case, sustainable cooking technologies); a further approach might involve the targeted use of tax or duty exemptions, such as those frequently offered on solar PV components, or on high-efficiency cooking appliances such as electric pressure cookers. These measures may be combined with other legal and regulatory measures, such as restrictions on charcoal use and distribution.

Governments should undertake rootand-branch reform of fossil fuel subsidies, which often benefit middle and upper-income residents, and re-allocate them to support a rapid scale-up in sustainable cooking technologies. In contrast to existing fossil fuel subsidies around the world, which tend primarily to benefit citizens with medium to high income levels, targeted support for sustainable cooking technologies tend, by default, to support lower income households. Re-allocating fossil fuel subsidies to accelerate the transition toward sustainable cooking would bring massive and lasting benefits to sustainable development, and would contribute significantly to re-balancing the major inequities that continue to persist between urban and rural regions. Reforming fossil fuel subsidies and re-allocating the proceeds to support

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sustainable cooking is perhaps one of the single most impactful steps that governments around the world can take to accelerate the transition.

Governments and donors around theworld need to fund a greater range ofR&D projects, including projects to demonstrate the viability of sustainable cooking solutions. Such initiatives could focus specifically on providing further analysis of cooking with different electric appliances such as slow cookers, pressure cookers and even infrared cookers,2 analysis of the behavioral and cultural acceptance of slow cookers and pressure cookers, as well as to support the scale-up of new business models in the cooking sector. These kinds of projects can be extremely valuable in order to gather cost and performance data, analyze behavioral and other challenges, while driving further technological innovation and cost reduction. Moreover, strategically supporting the emergence of new business models can help give rise to replicable, scalable projects at various points of the cooking value-chain. Skepticism of alternative cooking solutions remains high, not least among end-users: one of the best ways to overcome this is first to demonstrate their viability, and then to help drive technological improvement and cost reduction by expanding the market, and improving the mechanisms of delivery.

International climate finance shouldbe mobilized to play a far greater and more direct role in supporting the transition to sustainable cooking, including through innovative mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund and the wider use of climate bonds. Scaling up sustainable cooking represents one of the most significant opportunities worldwide to generate major climate change mitigation and adaptation “win-wins”: reducing reliance on traditional fuels such as firewood and charcoal, improving human health, while helping to preserve forest ecosystems and improve (or maintain) overall ecosystem resilience. New financing mechanisms such as climate bonds could significantly expand the volume of capital flowing to the sector, and yield wide-ranging benefits for both local citizens and the global climate.

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2 While this report does not look specifically at infrared cookers, they remain another potentially interesting

cooking technology for certain applications.

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TABLE OF CONTENT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

INTRODUCTION

OBJECTIVES OF THIS SECOND EDITION

OVERVIEW OF THE REPORT

1. WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE COOKING?

2. THE OPPORTUNITY OF ACHIEVING SUSTAINABLE COOKING

3. UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGE

3.1. NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF COOKING WITH

WOOD AND CHARCOAL

3.2. BARRIERS TO TRANSITION

3.3 OVERVIEW OF COOKING APPLIENCES

3.4. QUANTIFYING ANNUAL COOKING-RELATED

ENERGY NEEDS

4. MAIN TECHNOLOGICAL PATHWAYS FOR ACHIEVING

SUSTAINABLE COOKING

4.1. SOLAR HOME SYSTEM PATHWAY

4.2. MINI-GRID PATHWAY

5. SYNTHESIS AND KEY FINDINGS

6. BEYOND FIRE: 6 STEPS TO ACHIEVE SUSTAINABLE COOKING

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INTRODUCTION

Approximately 40% of the global population still cook with either wood, dung, coal, or charcoal to feed themselves or their fami-lies, placing tremendous strain on the sur-rounding environment and on human health (Goodwin et al. 2014, Chafe et al. 2013; Lacey et al. 2017).

• While roughly 1.1 Billion people still lack access to electricity worldwide (IEA 2017), almost three times that amount (or roughly 3.06 Billion) still rely on solid fuels for heating and cooking (Quinn et al. 2018; World Bank 2016a; Ekouevi 2014). This is likely to put significant additional strain on already stressed forest resources in many parts of the world (Quinn et al. 2018).

• On current trends, the SEforAll estimates that by 2030, as many as 2.3 Billion people worldwide will still lack access to clean cooking technologies due to a combina-tion of insufficient investment in clean cooking solutions and ongoing popula-tion growth (SEforAll 2018a, SEforAll 2018b).

• In several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the use of wood and charcoal represents over 90% of total final energy consump-tion (FAO 2015).

• Unsustainable firewood and charcoal use is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in many countries and significantly exacerbates the negative effects of global climate change (Quinn et al. 2018). Burning firewood and charcoal is closely linked to both forest degradation as well as to deforestation, while increas-ing a region’s exposure to a host of other environmental risks such as soil loss, desertification, loss of biodiversity, and

water scarcity (Ekouevi 2014; Rosenthal et al. 2018).

• Reliance on such traditional fuels for cooking is directly linked to an estimated 4 million pre-mature deaths around the world, mostly of women and children, due to high levels of indoor air pollution (WHO, 2018).

• There is an estimated USD $123 Billion in annual costs to human health, to the environment, and to local economies caused by the use of solid fuels like wood and charcoal for cooking (GACC 2016).

• The availability and affordability of both firewood and charcoal are likely to emerge as major problems in the coming decades for many countries around the world as the associated pressures from climate change, timber harvesting, and industrial agriculture combine to accelerate the rate of forest loss.

Transitioning to more sustainable forms of cooking in regions like sub-Saharan Africa therefore remains a pressing global issue. As these few facts highlight, finding sustaina-ble alternatives to cooking is not only an environmental imperative; it is critical for improving human health, for poverty reduc-tion, as well as for advancing economic opportunity in the world’s poorest and most under-privileged regions. And yet, in con-trast to other major global issues, the issue of cooking rarely figures at the top of the policy agenda. Despite the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all,” the volume of finance being allocated to the sector is in fact declining (SEforAll 2018a). This is partly

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why a growing number of leading interna-tional organizations are urging donors and investors to allocate more time and resources to achieving sustainable cooking sector (UNDP 2016; AfDB 2017; World Bank 2017; SEforAll 2018a).

Notably, the Green Climate Fund, in part-nership with the World Bank and the GIZ, has made substantial investments in clean cooking solutions, including in Bangladesh,3 where a total of USD $82.2 Million (EUR 73.3 Million) has been committed over a 3.5 year period, as well as in Kenya and Senegal,4 where a total of USD $26.7 Million (EUR 23.8 Million) has been committed over a period of 4 years.

Both of these initiatives are a sign that while the total funding commitments being allo-cated to support the transition to sustaina-ble cooking remain a fraction of what is needed (SEforAll 2017a, SEforAll 2018a,b), awareness is growing of the urgency of the challenge.

Significant declines in the cost of renewable energy technologies (namely solar PV modules, inverters and battery systems) as well as progress in mini-grid and storage technologies is beginning to make solar the

most cost-effective source of new electric-ity supply in many regions of the world, most notably in rural and remote regions (IRENA 2019; BNEF and responsibility 2019; Lazard 2018; BNEF 2018; Agora Energiewende 2018). This is particularly the case in much of sub-Saharan Africa, where solar resources are abundant, and the costs of either diesel systems or of expanding existing transmission and distribution infra-structure is often prohibitive (IFC 2015).

While attention on improving the sustaina-bility of the cooking sector has begun to increase in recent years, much of the effort to tackle the challenge of sustainable cook-ing in Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be focused on improv-ing conventional cook stove technologies, promoting the use of pellets from either wood products or agricultural wastes, shifting to LPG, as well as the overall effi-ciency of charcoal production (CCA 2019; GACC 2018; GACC 2016; ECREEE 2015).

Even though these improvements are cer-tainly needed, continuing to further entrench the reliance on combustible fuels cannot be long-term sustainable solution to the challenge of cooking.

3 See: https://www.greenclimate.fund/projects/fp070 4 See: https://www.greenclimate.fund/projects/fp103?inheritRedirect=true&redirect=%2Fw

hat-we-do%2Fprojects-programmes

https://www.greenclimate.fund/projects/fp070 https://www.greenclimate.fund/projects/fp103?inheritRedirect=true&redirect=%2Fwhat-we-do%2Fprojects-https://www.greenclimate.fund/projects/fp103?inheritRedirect=true&redirect=%2Fwhat-we-do%2Fprojects-

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OBJECTIVES OF THIS SECOND EDITION

The aim the Beyond Fire report is to provide an overview of the main technological pathways to fundamentally transform the cooking sector in developing countries to sustainable sources. The 2016 report pro-vided an analysis of the main technological options and an estimate of their costs, and feasibility, drawing on updated costs and market data. This 2019 update indicates the extent to which changes in the costs of different cooking options impact the eco-nomic viability of alternative cooking solu-tions especially solar home systems and mini-grids and what these changes in costs might mean for future policy regarding the cooking sector.

This update focuses specifically on provid-ing an updated analysis of electric cooking using higher-efficiency appliances in both SHS and mini-grid environments. Since the situation for biogas and power-to-gas (P2G) has not changed significantly since the publication of the first report, it is not fea-tured in great detail in this report. The reader can find a more in-depth treatment of both P2G and biogas options in the 2016 Beyond Fire report.

In particular, one of the aspects incorpo-rated into this version of the report that was absent from the first edition is a discussion of electric slow cookers and pressure cook-ers, two technologies with a number of advantages over traditional cooking appli-ances. Beyond their higher efficiency, slow cookers and pressure cookers are well adapted to cooking many of the meals traditionally cooked in many parts of the world.

The 2016 report also relied on a basic met-ric for comparing the costs of different cooking applications. The aim was to ena-ble a simple, apples-to-apples comparison of different cooking technologies, and provide a benchmark against which each could be objectively compared. However, the 1GJ number ignores the potential of high-efficiency end-use appliances to reduce the real energy demand required to cook, thereby ignoring one of the greatest potential areas for cost reduction. While the decline in solar and battery storage costs has helped a lot in terms of improving the economics of off-grid energy access, what was equally transformative was improve-ments in LED technologies that substan-tially reduced the total solar PV system size required to meet that lighting need.

As this report finds, high-efficiency end-use appliances like slow cookers and pressure cookers have the potential to replicate the transformative impact of high-efficiency LED lighting on reducing the costs of off-grid electricity access.

The cost of both solar PV and storage units has come down rapidly in recent years.

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COST DECLINES OF SOLAR PV MODULES AND LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES SINCE 2010

FIGURE 1:

As a result of the critical importance of end-use efficiency,5 the update of this report adopts a more granular, bottom-up analysis of energy demand for electric cooking options, rather than applying the simple 1GJ/person/year across the board.

In the process, this report attempts to cap-ture the system-level savings from high-ef-ficiency end use appliances, namely, the potential to reduce the size of the PV + battery system by using high-efficiency end-use appliances: in other words, the aim is to optimize the efficiency of the cooking system as a whole in order to reduce the

DECLINE IN SOLAR COSTS SINCE 2010

82%

76%DECLINE IN BATTERY STORAGE COSTS SINCE 2010

SOURCE: Author’s depiction, based on BNEF and Facebook 2018

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5 For a more in-depth look at end-use efficiency, see Lovins, 2005. https://d231jw5ce53gcq.cloudfront.net/

wp-content/uploads/2017/04/OCS_Energy_End-Use_Efficiency_2005.pdf 6 Note that most PAYGO companies enable their customers to own the system once it is paid off. This means that

most PAYGO contracts are in fact a form of “lease-to-own” contract.

total capital investment required. This reduced upfront capital investment is enough to dramatically reduce the cost to rural households, and enough in certain contexts to justify the more widespread adoption of electric pressure cookers and slow cookers in off-grid settings.

As awareness of the increasing cost-com-petitiveness of electric cooking grows, it can be anticipated that a growing number of pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) companies currently operating around the world will start offering high-efficiency cooking appliances, helping catalyze the transition beyond fire.6

One of the primary objectives of the report is to inform the political and donor discourse and trigger a much wider policy dialogue about future pathways for the cooking sector. As the cost of renewable energy and storage technologies decreases, technological options are likely to open in the coming years that are not yet part of the international discussion on sustainable cooking options. This relates to a further objective of report, which is to help policy-makers better understand the challenge of achieving sustainable cooking and to sug-gest concrete steps to drive this transition.

So far, much of the global energy debate with regard to renewable energy technolo-gies is focused on electricity generation. However, as pointed out above, in many developing countries cooking-related energy use represents over 90% of total primary energy demand. For such coun-tries, attempting to scale up renewable electricity supply without focusing on the cooking sector is therefore inadequate, as it leaves much of the energy supply mix as well as many of the most significant chal-lenges untouched. In light of these and

many other changes taking place world-wide, it is time to consider how these vari-ous technologies could help accelerate the transition toward sustainable cooking.

In order to clarify the path toward imple-mentation, the 2019 Beyond Fire report focuses on two (2) different technological pathways (the use of electric cooking appliances in a solar home system as well as in a mini-grid context) and assesses their overall technical viability as well as their scalability. While the report analyses different technological pathways, it recog-nizes that a purely “technical” fix alone is not enough. Indeed, all successful techno-logical transitions (e.g. from horses to auto-mobiles, from kerosene lanterns to electric light bulbs) are accompanied by a range of important cultural, administrative, legal, and behavioral changes (Sovacool 2016; Ekouevi, 2014). Moreover, this report recog-nizes that in order to be successful, any new technology must be embraced by end-us-ers, it must be both affordable and conven-ient to use, and its market adoption must be both affordable and convenient to use, and its market adoption must scale from the bottom-up on the basis of consumer demand, rather than be introduced or imposed top-down (IFC 2012; Palit and Bhattacharyya 2014).

While the report will not be able to provide in-depth answers to all of the challenges it lists, it aims to engage decision-makers critically in this debate and to encourage them to think beyond improved cook stove (ICS) technologies and the continued reli-ance on wood and charcoal-based solu-tions; in the process, it aims to explore whether other pathways are possible, and if so, what challenges will need to be over-come for them to become credible, scala-ble alternatives.

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OVERVIEW OF THE REPORT

PART 1 of the report sets the stage by first defining what is meant by sustainable cook-ing while providing a brief discussion of why the traditional focus on improved cook-stoves does not go far enough.

PART 2 of the report focuses on the tre-mendous opportunity of transitioning to more sustainable forms of cooking, with a focus on the various health, economic, and environmental benefits that it could bring.

PART 3 of the report provides an analysis of the overall challenge of achieving sustaina-ble cooking, and highlights many of the limiting factors, focusing mainly on Sub-Saharan Africa. It also discusses some of the questions and concerns commonly raised when the possibility of cooking with solar, with mini-grid supplied power, or with new technologies like power-to-gas is discussed.

PART 4 of the report contains the main body of the analysis on alternative cooking solutions. Section 4.1 examines the poten-tial of solar home systems (SHS) accompa-nied by storage and examines each of the four main cooking appliances available, including electric hot plates, induction stoves, slow cookers (often referred to as crock pots), and pressure cookers. Section 4.2 considers the potential of scaling-up cooking within mini-grids. Like the SHS section, the mini-grid section factors in the different efficiencies of the four different cooking appliances outlined above.

In examining each of these different path-ways, the report provides an analysis of the approximate costs of each technology, the various technical, social, financial, and cultural barriers each pathway faces, as well as an analysis of a number of relevant cul-tural and behavioral factors that influence the viability of each.

PART 5 of the report provides a synthesis of the key findings, while Part 6 lays out a five-point action agenda for donors, policy-makers and international investors.

1.WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE COOKING?

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This report adopts the traditional definition of sustainable development to approach the challenge of achieving truly sustainable cooking. According to this framework, this means transitioning to a future where cooking needs are met in a way that is economically, socially and environmen-tally sustainable.7 According to this defini-tion, the continued large-scale use of wood-based fuels is deemed to be unsus-tainable due to the significant health and environmental impacts associated with wood harvesting and use. While plans are afoot in certain countries (e.g. the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to significantly increase the share of planta-tion-grown wood in the production of charcoal and firewood in the years ahead, this is unlikely to be sustainable either: not only are the objectives themselves often unrealistic (in the case of the DRC, the target is to replace between 90-100% of total cooking-related biomass use with plantation-grown wood by 2030), they are likely to accelerate already unsustainable rates of deforestation while potentially worsening the food-vs-fuel dilemma fre-quently faced in the biofuels sector.

Some argue that pellets or other forms of biomass can be made sustainable if the production and harvesting are improved

and if more regulation and certification bodies are put in place to oversee the sec-tor. These arguments, however, ignore (or fail to fully appreciate) the sheer power of demographics: the population of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is projected to almost triple by 2060, reaching as high as 2.7 Billion up from 1 Billion in 2015 (World Bank 2015).

Given that the overwhelming majority of citizens in SSA continue to rely on biomass to meet their cooking needs (either in the form of firewood or charcoal), failing to fundamentally change the energy mix in the cooking sector away from biomass will all-but-ensure that the rates and extent of harvesting and deforestation will be unsustainable. Thus, given the size of the coming demographic boom, scalable and affordable alternatives to wood-based fuels are needed, and this is likely to remain the case regardless of how efficient the pellets or the cookstoves are made to be.

Thus, for the purposes of this report, plan-tation-based wood supply, pellets, and other alternatives that rely primarily on wood are not considered a long-term solution to the challenge of achieving sustainable cooking.

7 This is based on the widely used definition of sustainability that includes social, economic, and environmental

dimensions, reflected also in “triple bottom line” framework now in common use to govern investment decisions

around the world.

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WHY FOCUSING ON “IMPROVED COOKSTOVES” IS INSUFFICIENT

BOX 1:

While much effort continues to be devoted to deploying improved cook stove technologies, this report argues that in order to solve the enormous challenge of sustainable cooking in developing countries, we will have to move beyond these traditional options.8 Despite significant improvements in recent years, improved cookstoves, when considered collectively, still require huge amounts of charcoal and wood, the harvesting and production of which continue to have significant negative impacts on the environment and on human health. Indoor air pollution is directly linked to roughly four (4) million premature deaths every year, mainly of women and children (WHO 2018).While improved cookstoves help mitigate this problem, they do not eliminate it, as the widespread air pollution surrounding densely populated areas such as the “ger” districts outside Ulan Bator in Mongolia or the informal settlements around Abuja in Nigeria illustrate (Bittner, 2016; Hassan and Abdullahi, 2012). In other words, while efficient cookstoves may significantly reduce indoor air pollution, they continue to contribute significantly to air pollution in the surrounding area, particularly in regions with high population densities such as urban and peri-urban areas. Furthermore, informal production and distribution structures along the entire value chain of charcoal (even when efficiently produced) still leaves many producers and harvesters vulnerable to economic exploitation, particularly women and children (GACC 2015). On the environmental front, wood harvesting, charcoal burning, transport and trade are in most cases unregulated, making it difficult to obtain reliable data about rates of extraction and consumption. The rampant pace of wood and charcoal consumption for cooking, particularly around the large urban areas such as Lagos (Nigeria), Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), is exacerbating unsustainable forestry practices and leading to increased soil erosion, reduced agricultural output, as well as a deterioration in both the quantity and the quality of fresh water (Sanga and Jannuzzi 2005; Hilderman 2010). And finally, in light of the rapid population growth anticipated in many regions reliant on wood-based cooking, the continued over-reliance on wood-based cooking (however efficiently used) is likely to become less and less sustainable in the long-term simply due to the underlying demographic trends, which will put an increasing burden on forest resources, exacerbate desertification, reduce access to potable water, and further jeopardize long-term prosperity (UNESCO 2012). These concerns are increasingly urgent: in light of the anticipated rate of population growth, rapid deforestation caused in part to meet cooking needs is likely to continue across the region, and this is likely to remain the case even if more efficient cookstoves or charcoal production techniques are utilized.Thus, this report proposes that efficient cookstoves and improved charcoal production techniques are best understood as interim measures, rather than truly long-term, sustainable solutions. Some point to the use of pellets derived from agricultural wastes as a potentially sustainable alternative to firewood and charcoal (Fulland 2016). However, while agricultural wastes remain a valuable resource, they are often not present in sufficient quantities to durably meet local cooking needs, making them a partial solution at best; this issue is likely to remain a challenge for biogas systems as well (see Section 4.3). In light of the importance and urgency of this topic, there is a need to explore the potential for more transformational solutions that move beyond wood or charcoal-based cooking altogether.

8 Note that “improved cookstoves” in this section refers particularly to those stove models designed to operate

using firewood and charcoal.

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Much national government and donor-based support in the cooking sector is currently focused on accelerating the tran-sition to LPG, as the latter is seen as a cleaner, more modern fuel than traditional cookstoves and is associated with far lower human health and environmental impacts.

However, the use of traditional liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) derived from fossil fuels is also deemed unsustainable in the long-term, first and foremost as it is non-re-newable. Beyond the fact that LPG is non-renewable, it is also inherently volatile in price as it is linked to oil prices: this increases the risk of a sudden reversion to traditional cooking fuels such as wood and charcoal in many of the regions of the world when prices spike. LPG prices in many key markets including in East Africa, West Africa, and the Asia Pacific region has increased in recent years, pushing many households to revert back to traditional firewood (Asante et al. 2018). LPG is also exposed to greater geopolitical and other related risks, as many countries reliant on

LPG do not refine their own domestically, making supply inherently interruptible. In light of these and other factors, LPG may be seen as a transitional fuel: it is arguably not, however, a long-term solution to the chal-lenge of achieving sustainable cooking.

In defining what is meant by “sustainable cooking”, this report retains the approach outlined in the first report. According to this definition, a technology has to be environ-mentally, socially, as well as economically sustainable to be considered truly sustaina-ble in the long-term.

If sustainability, as defined by the landmark Brundtland Commission in 1987 as meeting “the needs of the present without com-promising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, remains our long-term goal, the cooking sector as a whole remains still has a long way to go (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987).

2.THE OPPORTUNITY OF ACHIEVING SUSTAINABLE COOKING

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TABLE 1: FACTS AND FIGURES

93% Percentage of households in Sub-Saharan Africa rely on wood energy for their daily cooking needs (Cerutti et al. 2015)

3 BILLIONApproximate number of citizens worldwide that relies on open fires and simple stoves using wood, dung, charcoal, and coal to cook their food (GACC 2015).

4 MILLION Premature deaths worldwide associated with household air pollution caused by cooking with traditional fuels like wood and charcoal (WHO 2018).

30% Share of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa living on less than USD $1.25/day (World Bank 2014)

1GJ

Estimated wood or charcoal energy required per person per year for cooking purposes in Sub-Saharan Africa (Demierre et al. 2014; Sanga and Jannuzzi 2005). This represents approximately 35kg of charcoal, or just over 60kg of firewood per person per year of final energy use. Due to the inefficiency of most cookstoves used to burn firewood and charcoal, the actual firewood and charcoal use is far higher.

83% Proportion of households in Sub-Saharan Africa that still do not have access to clean cooking (IEA 2017)

Currently, the level of access to clean cooking solutions remains lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa (SEforAll 2018b).

SHARE OF POPULATION WITH ACCESS TO CLEAN COOKING9FIGURE 2:

9 Note: the top 20 Access Deficit Countries refer to the twenty countries in the world with the largest per capita

energy access gaps. These access gaps are calculated both for electricity access as well as for access to clean

cooking.

100%

50%-100%

10%-50%

0% -10%

Data Unavaiable

Top 20 Access Deficit Countries

SOURCE: World Health Organization. Population

estimates based on the use UN population data

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ANNUAL INCREASE IN CLEAN COOKING ACCESS RATE (2010-2016)FIGURE 3:

And in contrast to the rate of electricity access, which is growing in virtually all countries worldwide, the rate of access to clean cooking is actually falling in certain countries, notably in Mali, Chad, and Zambia (SEforAll 2018b).

Transitioning to sustainable cooking could yield a wide range of benefits to hundreds of millions of citizens around the world, including:• Improved health and life expectancy

through reductions in household air pollution;

• Increased economic opportunity by free-ing residents (primarily women and chil-dren) from the burden of gathering, pre-paring, and transporting wood and charcoal products;

• Improved educational outcomes and literacy rates, as children need to spend less time gathering firewood;

• Significant reductions in deforestation, which brings a host of direct and indirect benefits for local communities, including improved water quality and availability;

• Improved resilience against drought and desertification;

• Reduced soil erosion;• Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions

and other harmful air pollutants.

As this short list underscores, many of the benefits of reducing reliance on wood and charcoal-based cooking fuels extend far beyond energy or even climate change, helping address a range of other key inter-national priorities, such as reducing gender inequity, improving child literacy rates, as well as reducing deforestation (SEforAll 2015; SEforAll 2018b).

As such, any analysis of the challenges of achieving sustainable cooking needs to take this complex set of factors into considera-tion, as the costs and risks of continuing with the status quo are enormous and often under-appreciated. Transitioning to more sustainable cooking solutions around the world can therefore play a key role in deliv-ering on the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as cooking cuts across many of the key areas of focus.

As described above, this report attempts to critically examine some of the main ques-tions raised about the viability and scalabil-ity any alternative pathways to sustainable cooking. The table below provides an over-view of a number of questions that fre-quently emerge.

Annual access growth >2 percentage points

Annual access growth 0-2 percentage points

Annual access growth rate failing

Top 20 Access Deficit Countries

SOURCE: SEforAll 2018b

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TABLE 2: COMMON QUESTIONS CONCERNING ALTERNATIVE COOKING SOLUTIONS

Common Questions Short Answers

Isn’t it more efficient to cook with a primary fuel like wood, rather than first generating electricity which is then converted into thermal form? What about the thermodynamic losses?

This is certainly the case if the electricity is first generated by burning a primary fuel such as coal, natural gas, or diesel. However, with RE technologies like solar and wind, there are no large thermodynamic losses at the beginning of the process, as wind and solar power can be used directly in electrical cooking appliances, and overall conversion losses are small. Also, once installed, the marginal cost of technologies like solar is effectively zero, although routine maintenance is required and both battery systems and inverters need to be replaced at regular intervals (e.g. every 4-7 years, depending on customer usage behavior).

Aren’t wood and charcoal far more “energy dense” than solar? How can solar ever provide the amount as well as the density of energy required to meet cooking needs?

Energy density is an important challenge. One consequence of this is that large amounts of solar (or wind, or other RE source) are required to produce the same thermal energy as that found in solid fuels like wood, or charcoal. While this remains a chal-lenge, it is beginning to be overcome in part through improved technologies (e.g. storage, P2G), and through the improved efficiencies of cooking appliances. Also, it is estimated that the conversion efficiency of trees at converting sunlight into energy is approximately 1-8% (Hall and Rao 1999), compared to a range of 9% for the least-efficient modules to over 40% for more advanced solar technologies (Green et al. 2015).

Rural residents in many developing countries already struggle to pay for basic electricity services such as lighting and mobile charging, and often do not pay for their cooking fuel, opting to gather wood fuel instead. Won’t any electricity-based solution therefore be unaffordable for such low-income residents?

All new energy technologies face an upward challenge to reach wide-scale adoption. Transitioning to more sustainable forms of cooking is likely to require considerable public support and investment, including greater research and development (R&D). As the use of sustainable cooking technologies grows, this is likely to help drive down the costs, which is likely to help make them even more affordable for residents in rural areas.Meanwhile, the prices of charcoal continue to go up while fire-wood also faces hidden costs in terms of the time required to harvest it, a reality that especially impacts women and children.

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Won’t increasing reliance on electricity for cooking significantly increase the total peak demand requirements, which is often concentrated primarily in 2-3 hours of the day, leading to an inefficient over-investment in generation capacity? Can such a massive increase in electricity generating capacity ever be affordable, particularly in rural and remote areas where income levels are low?

Meeting evening demand peaks caused by cooking with either battery storage or with back-up supplies is one of the biggest challenges of electricity-based pathways for achieving sustaina-ble cooking, particularly in mini-grids and for small SHS.

In SHS, peak demand can be decreased by using more energy efficient appliances and by potentially storing electricity during the day in order to use it in the evening hours. This possibility is one of the main reasons why technologies like pressure cookers emerge as a promising technology for meeting off-grid cooking needs: they involve a high power demand in the first 8-12 min-utes (which can be initiated during the daylight hours), followed by a long period of very low demand, enabling household elec-tricity use to be rationed once the sun has set.

In mini-grids, efforts have already been made using new signal-ing technologies to encourage households to slightly shift the timing of their electric cooking in order to maintain the proper and reliable functioning of the mini-grid system and avoid high peak demand because of parallel usage of energy intensive appliances. Such load-management technologies are increas-ingly the norm in mini-grids around the world and this extends to mini-grids designed to support electric cooking. The aim of such load-management technologies is not to regulate demand patterns strictly or to require users to cook at inconvenient times of the day, but rather to provide signals to residents in rural areas to inform them when supply is more limited (e.g. when the bat-tery bank is low) and when it is more abundant.

Isn’t power-to-gas (P2G) far too expensive and complicated to be used in a context such as SSA?

While the technology to produce synthetic methane is itself complicated, the same may be said for automobiles, welding machines, or a number of other appliances commonly used in rural or peri-urban regions. The important point is that the end product is not, and in the case of cooking gas, it is already in wide use throughout SSA and large parts of Asia in the form of lique-fied petroleum gas, or LPG. If the business case for P2G can be made investable by making the end product cost-competitive with other alternatives like LPG and charcoal, the complexity of production should not pose a significant barrier to scale-up.

In order to better organize the various technological pathways and potential policy interventions, this report distin-guishes between urban areas, peri-urban or

near-grid areas, as well as rural and remote areas. The figure below provides an over-view of these three regions:

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Distinguishing between these three key regions is important, as the various benefits as well as the various policy and technolog-ical interventions required to create them are also likely to look different depending on which region is targeted. For instance, citizens living in urban areas may face higher costs of charcoal and have a higher willingness or ability to pay as well as greater access to alternatives, potentially making it easier to encourage large-scale substitution.10 In contrast, many rural and remote regions where there is little to no electricity access, lower cost for firewood and considerably lower willingness to pay, making it more difficult to encourage large-scale substitution. In addition, the cost of new technological solutions (e.g. electrici-

ty-based cooking pathways or power-to-gas pathways) may be more expensive to deliver in rural and remote regions, widen-ing the gap that needs to be bridged in order to make alternative cooking solutions widely adopted by local residents, who are the ultimate end-users of cooking technologies.

In order to sharpen the focus, this report focuses primarily on rural (off-grid) and peri-urban (near-grid) areas, rather than in urban centers, though some of the solu-tions explored could also be applicable in urban areas, while some (such as renewa-bly-powered P2G) could even be better suited to areas with higher population densities.

CATEGORIZATION OF THREE KEY REGIONS WITH DIFFERENT COOKING NEEDS AND REALITIES

FIGURE 4:

RURAL AND REMOTE

(off-grid)

PERI-URBAN

(near-grid)

URBAN

(on-grid)

10 However, despite easier access to alternatives, this is not always the case: in certain urban areas such as those in

Tanzania, charcoal use has continued to grow rapidly despite the presence of alternatives (TATEDO 2016).

http://www.tatedo.org/news.php?readmore=5

http://www.tatedo.org/news.php?readmore=5

3.UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGE

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Despite the many benefits listed above, a number of crucial barriers continue to stand in the way of a sustained scale-up beyond unsustainable wood-based cooking. This section is broken down into four different sub-sections that serve to set the stage for rest of the report: the first examines the various negative effects associated with continued reliance on wood and charcoal for cooking (3.1.); the second focuses on better understanding the barriers to sustain-able cooking (3.2.); the third outlines the methodology used to quantify cooking-re-lated energy needs (3.3.); and the fourth provides an overview of the different cook-ing appliances available, as distinct from the actual energy sources used to power them (3.4.).

3.1. Negative Effects of Cooking with Wood and Charcoal

In order to understand the case for acceler-ating the transition to more sustainable cooking, it is important to consider the various negative effects of continued reli-ance on the primary existing fuel sources, namely, wood and charcoal. This section considers seven (7) different negative effects.

Wood Consumption:Sub-Saharan Africa continues to have the highest average per-capita wood consump-tion in the world, with an estimated 0.69m3/year (or roughly 480 kg per person per year, or 1.3kg per person per day) (Cerutti et al. 2015). Estimates for highly forested countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are closer to 1 m3/year (or roughly 700kg per person per year, or 1.9kg per person per day) (Mayaux et al. 2013). This compares to a global esti-mated average of 0.27m3/year. Concerns over unsustainable deforestation have led the government of Tanzania to enforce a temporary ban on the charcoal trade (Hayduk 2017), a move that Kenya has recently followed (Rodriguez 2018). The sheer rate of cooking related wood con-sumption, when combined with anticipated population growth, makes the concerns

over deforestation real, and increasingly urgent.

Moreover, since most fuel wood used for cooking in Sub-Saharan Africa is not pur-chased, but gathered from the surrounding environment, this makes it more challeng-ing to introduce alternatives into the mar-ket, as the benchmark price of gathering fuel wood is effectively zero. This singular fact poses a unique challenge, particularly in the regions that are most reliant on fuel wood for their cooking needs, as it is in these regions where the ability or willing-ness to pay are typically the lowest.

Environmental Impacts:Reliance on wood and charcoal for cooking has a number of well-recorded negative effects, including forest degradation, soil erosion, loss of many critical ecosystem services, loss of biodiversity, loss of food sources from indigenous plants and ani-mals, among others. (GEF 2013; Sanga and Jannuzzi 2005; Hilderman 2010; UNESCO 2012). Compounding these various impacts is the fact that most areas deforested for either firewood or charcoal production are rarely replanted, resulting in further negative impacts while undermining local ecosys-tems’ capacity to recover.

Human Health Impacts:Health impacts related to exposure to poor air quality include a wide range of issues including increased infant mortality, reduced life expectancy, pulmonary and other respiratory diseases, as well as a heightened risk of cancer (WHO 2018; GACC 2015). Out of the estimated 4 million pre-mature deaths per year globally directly linked to indoor air pollution associated with cooking with wood and related fuels, 12% are due to pneumonia, 34% from stroke, 26% from ischemic heart disease, 22% from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and 6% are estimated to come from lung cancer (WHO 2018).

Gender Inequality:Data gathered from Sub-Saharan Africa

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suggest that men and women over fifteen (15) years of age spent between eight (8) and nine (9) hours per week collecting wood to meet their household cooking needs (World Bank 2006). Women and in particular children remain exposed to much of the negative health impacts of cooking due to high levels of indoor air pollution.

Opportunity Costs:There are significant negative economic consequences and tremendous opportu-nity costs of spending so many hours engaged in gathering and transporting wood and/or charcoal. In some villages in western Tanzania, for instance, residents travel up to 10km per day to collect wood (Mwampamba 2007). This underscores the significant opportunity cost of gathering traditional biomass for cooking purposes: if women and children are out gathering wood, this limits their opportunities to go to school, improve their education, or engage in other more productive activities. This restricts literacy among the young and significantly harms long-term economic prosperity. Thus, lifting the burden that gathering firewood imposes on residents, particularly those in rural and peri-urban areas, could significantly assist in lifting millions out of poverty both by improving their health, as well as by freeing up their time.

3.2. Barriers to TransitionThere are many crucial challenges that continue to limit the uptake of new and more sustainable cooking technologies. These include:• A number of cultural and behavioral

barriers linked to cooking habits, tradi-tions, and taste preferences (Goodwin et al. 2014; Palit and Bhattacharyya 2014; Diehl et al. 2018; Brown et al. 2017);

• High upfront cost of alternatives, includ-

ing both the cooking appliances them-selves (the stoves or ovens) and the costs of procuring the energy required to run them (i.e. paying for the gas, the electric-ity, or the pay-as-you-go plan) (GEF 2013; Puzzolo et al. 2016);

• The availability in many regions of zero-cost fuel wood,11 gathered by residents directly from the surrounding environ-ment, which hampers the adoption of alternatives and impedes substitution (Schlag and Zuzarte, 2008); it is estimated that only some 50% of households in Sub-Saharan Africa pay something for their cooking fuels, with the remaining 50% gathering firewood directly from the surrounding area (Leach and Oduro, 2015);

• The risk of reversion, which occurs when residents revert to traditional cooking technologies even though cleaner options are available, typically due to cost, preference, or other factors (Asante et al. 2018);

• Low income levels, which make it diffi-cult to finance and support the market uptake of more sustainable solutions, particularly for lower income residents, or those at the bottom-of-the-pyramid (Puzzolo et al. 2016);12

• Lack of familiarity with (and occasionally even resistance to) the use of new tech-nologies (Palit and Bhattacharyya 2014);

• The remoteness of many regions reliant on wood and wood-based fuels for cook-ing, which increases the cost and logisti-cal challenges of delivering interventions.

As the above list highlights, the barriers facing the uptake and diffusion of more sustainable cooking technologies are signif-icant and in many cases, difficult to over-come. Foremost among these barriers are cultural and behavioral factors: cooking choices, taste preferences and behaviors

11 Assuming that the costs of gathering wood is free; this of course is not entirely true, as there is always an

opportunity cost. 12 The term « bottom of the pyramid » refers to the portion of the global population with the lowest average

income levels.

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are deeply tradition-based and loca-tion-specific, making it difficult to drive large-scale substitution in the market, while also limiting the potential scalability of alternatives (Goodwin et al. 2014; Leach and Oduro 2015; Brown et al. 2017; Diehl et al. 2018). Overcoming both the cultural barriers as well as the underlying economic barriers of cooking in developing countries presents a formidable challenge. Cooking is deeply embedded in people’s way of life, and is woven into the very fabric of communities, which means that communi-ties are likely to remain more resistant to change than they might be with other innovations such as the advent of mobile technologies (Goodwin et al. 2014; Palit and Bhattacharyya 2014; Ekouevi 2014). Thus, any effort to scale-up alternative cooking solutions needs to be based on a sound analysis of what actually drives the adoption and diffusion of new technolo-gies. Behaviors often run deep and the cultural and other social factors surround-ing the question of cooking make this uniquely so with sustainable cooking.

A further challenge relates to the level of awareness of cleaner cooking alternatives, including in particular of the possibility of adopting electric-based cooking solutions: a number of high-profile reports recently published on the clean cooking sector scarcely discuss cooking with electricity at all, focusing instead on improved cook-stoves, LPG, and other options (Puzzolo et al. 2016; Price 2017; Rosenthal et al. 2018; Quinn et al. 2018, among others).

The prevailing consensus among those working in the clean cooking sector emerges as one of the greatest barriers: electric cooking options are widely thought to require a national grid, and are therefore not believed to be a viable option for rural

and remote regions, which is where most households reliant on firewood and char-coal for cooking typically live. In such regions, grid infrastructure often does not exist, income levels typically are much lower, and power generation costs are often higher, making electricity use at the scale required for cooking purposes impractical, if not prohibitive, for most households. A further challenge is that even in regions that do have access to the national grid, power supply is unreliable, particularly in the evening hours when most households do most of their cooking (BNEF and ResponsAbility 2019).

All of these factors, combined with the many cultural and behavioral barriers to electric-based cooking, combined with the lack of awareness of alternatives, have led many to argue that cooking with electricity is not viable, especially in rural and remote regions.

The first edition of the “Beyond Fire” report attempted to challenge this prevailing narrative, and cast a different light on the question of sustainable cooking.

Recent examples of rapid adoption of new communication tools such as smart phones in areas where not even landline phones existed suggests the transition to the wide-spread adoption of new technologies can be quite rapid, provided the right conditions are in place.13 Key among these conditions are strong customer demand, the presence of significant and tangible benefits over alternatives, and the product being available at an affordable cost. The question of cost is important in two different senses: both the upfront cost, as well as the ongoing, usage-related cost.

As Adkins et al. show for both Tanzania and

13 There is, however, an important difference between cleaner cooking technologies and mobile phones, namely,

that there is currently no alternative to communicate remotely with friends, colleagues, or family members other

than via a mobile phone. By contrast, there are many different ways of cooking (Fulland 2016).

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Uganda, the willingness to invest in more expensive (though significantly more effi-cient) cookstoves dropped dramatically when the price rose from USD $10 per unit to $17.5 per unit (Adkins et al. 2010). This suggests a significant customer reluctance to spend much more than USD $10 per stove, and points to an important insight for any successful interventions in the cooking sector: the business model used to scale up the use of the new technology must strive to make the technology affordable from the outset, as well as on an ongoing basis.

Making new cooking technologies afforda-ble to residents, particularly those in rural and remote regions where income levels are quite low, may therefore require bun-dling the cost of the technology and/or cooking appliances into an affordable, flat (e.g. monthly) payment in order to circum-vent the high upfront cost barrier, and in order to ensure that the actual costs of using the technology remain affordable. Failure to do so increases the risk that resi-dents will revert to their previous cooking behaviors as soon as economic or social circumstances change. This points to the need either for targeted support (e.g. subsi-dies) or customized financing solutions that allow end-users to amortize the cost of both the cooking appliances themselves, as well as the systems (or cylinders) used to power them.14

A further critical factor is the low income levels in many of the regions that are most reliant on traditional cooking fuels. It is often the lowest-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, that have the highest reliance on wood and charcoal for their cooking needs (Leach and Oduro, 2015). Over twenty (20) countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, have more than

50% of their populations living on a daily income level of less than USD $3.20 per day (World Bank 2016b). In such countries, many of the poorest citizens live in rural or in peri-urban regions and often do not have the income required to afford significant changes in their cooking habits, even if such changes would bring significant bene-fits for their family health and future eco-nomic prospects.

Thus, developing interventions, policies, or investment plans to support the transi-tion to sustainable cooking technologies in these regions has to be designed to work in an environment with low income levels, and with a correspondingly low willingness (and/or ability) to pay.

A further problem complicating the situa-tion is that research shows that most households do not fully “substitute” from one fuel to another, as was previously implied by the traditional “energy ladder” model of development, but instead com-bine different fuels for different purposes in a process known as “fuel stacking” (IEA 2006). Modern forms of energy such as electricity are typically used very sparingly at first and are only used for particular ser-vices such as radio or watching television, while other fuels such as LPG might be used to boil water, and charcoal might be used to cook traditional dishes. Moreover, research suggests that people are likely to switch away from both cooking and heating last, the two single largest sources of household energy use (IEA, 2006). For instance, in Nigeria and Ghana, two of the countries with the highest rates of electrifi-cation in West Africa, 60 to 70% of the population continues to rely on either charcoal or wood for their cooking needs. This figure rises to over 90% for countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone.

14 An example of this that has begun to emerge in certain regions is a business model in which pellet producers are

beginning to offer residents the option of signing up for a “cooking service contract” that combines the use of a

stove and a monthly supply of pellets for a flat monthly rate (Fulland 2016). New business models like this could

play an important role in accelerating the adoption of more sustainable cooking technologies (see World Bank

2014).

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Indeed, relying on multiple fuels can pro-vide a sense of energy security: relying primarily or exclusively on only one fuel source is likely to leave households vulnera-ble to sudden disruptions of supply, or rapid increases in price. As has been pointed out in a recent landmark report, “As incomes increase and fuel options widen, the fuel mix may change, but wood is rarely entirely excluded.” (World Bank 2014).

It is important to underscore that the choice of cooking technologies is rarely if ever driven strictly by economic consider-ations: as pointed out above, a range of factors including convenience, history, individual habits, and local culture play a significant role (Hosier et al. 1987; Zulu et al. 2013; Ekouevi 2014; Palit and Bhattacharyya 2014; Clemens et al. 2018; Diehl et al. 2018). Thus, sustainable cooking technologies must be well adapted to individual commu-nities’ way of life, and must be able to be easily integrated with existing cooking habits. This means that the transition to other fuel types, whether electricity or otherwise, is likely to be a gradual process; this underscores the need to accelerate this transition now.

3.3. Overview of Cooking AppliancesA further factor that is critical to understand in order to understand the challenge of achieving sustainable cooking is that the primary energy sources used are only part of the problem: there is also the actual technology or device used to convert that energy into a usable form. In this sense, the actual energy efficiency of the cooking device plays a critical role, and can be an important factor in improving the afforda-bility of sustainable cooking solutions.

There are three main types of cooking appliances:

Electric: These can be used either with the SHS pathway or under the mini-grid pathway, as well as in urban and peri-urban areas where there is sufficient access to electricity; this includes hot plates and hot coils as well as induction stoves, which operate by heating up a surface. The newest models available for electric hotplates range from 800W to 2300W and feature a price range of between as little as EUR 5 to EUR 100 or more (Thompson 2019; Konga 2016). Other reports confirm the availability of electric cooking appliances in the EUR 12-20 range in key markets in Sub-Saharan Africa such as Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana (Leach and Oduro 2015).15 The average efficiency of traditional hotplates and elec-tric coils ranges around 50%, while that of induction stoves typically ranges between around 60% up to around 85%.16

For this update/second edition of the Beyond Fire report, two additional cooking appliances are considered: slow cookers, as well as pressure cookers. Electric slow cookers (or so-called rice cookers) have a far lower wattage than either a hot plate or an induction stove, and therefore require less electricity overall. They also have an attractive electricity demand profile, requir-ing a smaller overall solar PV system in order to operate. Prices for slow cookers range from as little as EUR 10 up to EUR 100 or more, while sizes range from as little as 4 Liters to 12L or more.

Pressure cookers are another cooking appliance considered here: they operate by creating a pressurized environment in which a given meal can be heated, and therefore need to be cooked, over a shorter time period. This kind of long, slow-cooked meal is common in countries throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia, where grains

15 Note that the costs for cooking appliances provided by major platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon are

misleading, in that they often exclude delivery, transport, and other costs. As such, the prices used in this analysis

have been adjusted to reflect these differences. See: http://hot-plates-review.toptenreviews.com/16 The efficiency of hot plates and induction stoves has been adjusted downward in this version of the report on the

basis of recent evidence of actual electricity consumption of such appliances (see Lovelands 2018 and Wirfs-

Brock and Jacobson 2016).

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and various forms of beans are frequently cooked over long durations. Due to their higher efficiency, such pressure cookers provide a number of advantages over hot-plates and even induction based stoves. Currently, prices for electric pressure cook-ers range from EUR 20 to over EUR 100; like slow cookers, the sizes range from as little as 4 Liters up to over 12 Liters.

An overview of the electric appliances featured in this report is provided in Table 6. Gas based: these stoves consist of a gas burner that can be supplied with different gas- or liq-uid-based fuels, including kerosene, LPG, ethanol, biogas, and natural gas. These stoves are widely available in key markets and have a price range of between EUR 20 – 85 (Konga, 2016). The conversion effi-ciency of natural gas or LPG use when used in a standard gas stove for cooking ranges from 50-60%. Solid fuel based (wood, dung, pellets, bri-quettes, and charcoal): Many households continue to rely on cook-ing with three stones, positioned to hold a pot directly above the fire or burning coals. Traditional cookstoves range in cost, but most are available for only a few Euros or may be built directly by end-users.

Improved cookstoves, however, have a wider price range, and can be priced at between EUR 5 for basic models and EUR 65 per stove for the most advanced (World Bank 2011). The efficiency of cooking with solid fuels ranges widely depending on a range of factors including how dry the fuel is, the design of the cooking stove, as well as the ambient environment (wind, etc.); it is assumed to range from 5-20% for conven-tional firewood, and from to 20-50% on the high end for more efficient charcoal and pellet-based stoves.

Next to purchasing the modern cooking equipment, the fuel or energy input costs for each option are critical.

There is limited data available on the costs (and energy demand) of cooking appliances in the African market. Due to the limited market for DC appliances, they are gener-ally more expensive than standard AC appli-ances (Global LEAP, 2016). However, cost reductions for DC appliances can be expected for the near? future as the market for these products continues to grow. The table below provides an overview of the main categories of electric appliances available as well as the approximate daily energy consumption per household of each different cooking approach:17

17 For conversion factors, see Figure 5 in Part 5 below.

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TABLE 3: BASIC DATA ON COOKING TECHNOLOGIES AND ENERGY USE

ApplianceCost of the Stove (in EUR)

Watts(Range)

Approximate Daily Household Consumption (in Wh/d for electric options, or in kg/day for solid and gas-based fuels)

Approximate Daily Household Consumption(in MJ)

Three Stones (Wood)

0 N/A 4.15 – 20.76kg/d 68.48 – 342.54MJ

Traditional Cook Stove (Wood)

0 - 5 N/A 3.32 – 8.3kg/d 54.78 – 136.95MJ

Improved Cook Stove (Wood)

5 - 65 N/A 2.08 – 5.53kg/d 34.32 – 91.25MJ

Three Stones (Charcoal)

0 N/A 1.92 – 4.81kg/d 54.72 – 137.09MJ

Traditional Cook Stove (Charcoal)

0 - 10 N/A 1.6 – 4.01kg/d 45.60 – 114.29MJ

Improved Cook Stove (Charcoal)

5 – 65 N/A 1.2 – 2.4kg/d 34.20 – 68.40MJ

Improved Cook Stove (Wood-based Biomass Pellets)

16 – 80 N/A 1.76 – 3.96kg/d 30.41 – 68.43MJ

Improved Cook Stove (Agro-waste Pellets)

16 – 80 N/A 2.42 – 5.44kg/d 30.49 – 68.54MJ

Single Burner Hot Plate

8 - 35 600 – 2000 1200 – 4000 Wh/d 4.32 – 14.40

Induction Hot Plate 45 - 95 1000 – 2300 2000 – 4600 Wh/d 7.20 – 16.56MJ

Slow cooker / rice cooker / crock pot

10 - 130 120 – 300 175 – 700Wh/d 0.63 – 2.52MJ

Electric Pressure Cooker

19 - 140 500 - 1000 160 – 340Wh/d 0.58 – 1.22MJ

Microwave Oven 50 - 100 600 - 1200 100 – 1200 Wh/d 0.36 – 4.32MJ

Gas Stove (single burner)

20 – 60 N/A 0.3kg/d 13.7MJ

Gas Stove (double burner)

30 - 90 N/A 0.3kg/d 13.7MJ

Gas Stove (four burner)

40 - 100 N/A 0.3kg/d 13.7MJ

SOURCES: Atteridge et al. 2013; World Bank 2011; http://www.biomassenergycentre.org.uk/portal/page?_pageid=75,20041&_

dad=portal; Lotter et al. 2015; IEA 2006; Various Internet sources and manufacturers for the cooking stoves; note that these

prices may differ by location, and may be costlier in certain regions than in others. Assumed energy density ratios: Firewood =

16.5MJ/kg; Charcoal = 28.5MJ/kg; Wood pellets = 17.28MJ/kg; Agro-waste pellets = 12.6MJ/kg; LPG = 45.9MJ/kg. Conversion

ratio for electricity = 3.6MJ/kWh.

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3.4. Quantifying Annual Cooking- Related Energy Needs

It has been estimated that the total annual cooking-related energy needs per person is 1GJ (Sanga and Jannuzzi 2005; Demierre et al. 2014). This figure of 1GJ per person per year provides the basis for the cost analyses of the firewood and charcoal cooking solutions included in this report. However, in contrast to the first edition, where the 1GJ benchmark was used to provide an apples-to-apples price comparison for all of the different cooking solutions surveyed (except biogas; see Section 4.3), this updated edition adopts a different approach for both the solar home systems (SHS) and the mini-grid based pathways.

It is important to underscore that for both the firewood and charcoal cases, the 1GJ approach is based on final energy con-sumption, rather than on primary energy consumption: in other words, it represents 1GJ of final energy use in the process of cooking, rather than the total embodied primary energy of the firewood or charcoal. As such, the actual firewood and charcoal requirements, in terms of volume, were multiplied according to the (in)efficiency of the particular stove type being used (three stones (5-10% efficiency), traditional cook-stove (10-20% efficiency) and improved cookstoves (20-50%)

One concern of the 1GJ across-the-board approach is that it ignores the fact that different cooking technologies may in fact require less energy in total to provide a given amount of cooking. While the 1GJ

value appears broadly accurate for firewood and charcoal-based technologies, it argua-bly overstates the amount of cooking energy required to provide electricity-based cooking solutions, namely due to the fact that electric pathways involve much higher efficiency end-use appliances. By increas-ing the end-use efficiency of the cooking process, including the efficiency of the cooking pot, it is possible to reduce the total energy use of cooking by a factor of roughly 10.

Based on technology-specific assumptions for each of the different cooking pathways examined, it is possible to estimate the total cooking-related energy needs for a wide range of different energy sources and asso-ciated cooking appliances.

However, a critical factor remains the aver-age energy-intensity of the meals being cooked. According to Batchelor (2015), the energy required to cook each individual meal varies widely, and will play a significant role in determining the total energy needs (and total system size requirements) for any system equipped to meet this cooking need (see also Diehl et al. 2018). The figure below provides an overview of the main meal types and the total energy requirement to cook them in MJ; what is not specified however is which cooking appliance is used to derive these ranges. Based on the perfor-mance characteristics of slow cookers and pressure cookers, it is likely that even the long-cooked meals on the far right can be prepared for less than 1kWh.

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PER-MEAL ENERGY CONSUMPTION FOR A HOUSEHOLD OF FIVE (Left Axis = in MJ; Right Axis = kWh)

FIGURE 5:

Staple Starch Meals (e.g. potatoes, cassava)

Electricity Parafin LPG Ethanol Gel

Boiled rice Pasta Soft meats (e.g. liver)

Medium-Lenght Stews (e.g. Chickenand vegetable stew)

Longer-Cooking Meat Stews (e.g. Beef/Mutton Stew)

Longer Cooking Dried Vegetable Dishes (e.g. Maize and Beans)

Very Slow-Cooking Meat

PERI-URBAN

(near-grid)

0 0

2 0,5

4 1

6 1,5

8 2

10 2,5

12 3

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(IN K

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SOURCE: Adapted from Cowan 2008

Thus, the types, size, as well as the fre-quency of meals cooked, whether it is cooked at home or professionally (e.g. in a restaurant) will have a significant impact on the total average energy (or electricity) needs in a given village or region, and thus will impact the total system size required (in the case of solar PV or mini-grids). This is one reason why global comparisons of the

cooking sector are inherently difficult, as regional differences even within countries are sometimes quite large in terms of the most common meals cooked. As a result, this report relies on broad ranges of energy consumption per household, as well as a range of appliance efficiencies in order to arrive at comparable figures for each of the pathways examined.

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4.MAIN TECHNOLOGICAL PATHWAYS FOR ACHIEVING SUSTAINABLE COOKING

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This section will outline a wide range of different potential technological pathways to replace traditional biomass-based cook-stoves, including solar home systems, mini-grids, biogas and power to gas (P2G). The reason that this report focuses on these technologies as opposed to more common cooking alternatives such as solar cookers and solar water heaters is that they are seen to have greater overall potential to significantly accelerate the transition to sustainable cooking. Solar cookers and other technologies have a number of limitations, including social,

cultural and weather-related, that make it unlikely that they will ever significantly transform cooking behavior. Thus, this report focuses instead on technologies that are believed to have greater long-term viability and scalability. For each different energy source used to meet cooking needs, there is a range of different cooking appliances, as seen in the table above. As a benchmark, it is helpful to draw on the current ranges for firewood and charcoal:

TABLE 4: ACTUAL COOKING ENERGY DEMAND AND COSTS FOR FIREWOOD AND CHARCOAL18

Cooking Fuel

Actual Primary Energy Demand per Person for Electric Cooking (Range in MJ and kg), per person per year

Cost Range of Supplying 1GJ of Cooking Energy

Approximate Cost Range, per person per year

Firewood2.5 – 20GJ (approximately 151kg – 1212kg)

EUR 2.12 – 9.09 EUR 5.3 – 182

Charcoal2.5 – 10GJ(approximately 88kg – 351kg)

EUR 3.51 – 14.04 EUR 8.78 – 140.40

18 Assumptions: Cooking efficiencies range from 5% for the basic three-stones configuration up to 50% for efficient

charcoal stoves. Cost of firewood ranges from EUR 0.035/kg (for wood that is simply gathered from the

surrounding environment) to EUR 0.15/kg for dried wood. The cost of charcoal ranges from EUR 0.10/kg to EUR

0.40/kg, based on the price range currently seen across sub-Saharan Africa. The energy density of firewood is

assumed to be 16.5MJ/kg while that of charcoal is assumed to be 28.5MJ/kg. It is also noteworthy that charcoal

prices have been going up rapidly in many of the major markets in sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, Tanzania,

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4.1. Solar Home System PathwayIn order to accurately characterize the costs of cooking with electricity from a solar home system, it is necessary to move beyond the metric of 1GJ of cooking energy per person per year based on solid fuels (as assumed in the first edition of this report), largely due to the fact that the actual electricity required to cook depends fundamentally on the actual appliances used. Equally importantly, the total cost of the system will depend on the electricity consumption of the particular appliances: larger, less efficient cooking appliances like hot plates will require a far larger solar array and battery bank in order to enable cook-

ing. These “system-level” cost savings are substantial, and need to be taken into account in order to generate a more accu-rate picture of how solar home systems could be dimensioned to meet cooking needs.

In the case of firewood and charcoal, it is possible to estimate the impacts of different cooking appliances (traditional cookstoves and improved cookstoves, for instance), by increasing their efficiency. The range of efficiencies assumed for different cooking appliances used with wood and charcoal range from 5% for a three-stones configura-tion to 50% for the most efficient charcoal

TABLE 5: ACTUAL COOKING ENERGY DEMAND AND COSTS FOR SOLAR HOME SYSTEMS USING DIFFERENT COOKING APPLIANCES

CookingAppliance(actualwattageassumed)

ActualWattageModelled

Low ElectricCookingHousehold(kWh per day)

AverageElectricCookingHousehold(kWh per day)

High ElectricCookingHousehold(kWh per day)

Approximate Cost Rangeper personper year(EUR): 3-yearrepayment*

Hours ofCooking

1 Hour/day 2 Hours/day 4 Hours/day

Electric Hot Plate

2000W 0.6kWh 1.2kWh 2.4kWh 110 - 130

Induction Hot Plate

1500W 0.5kWh 1kWh 2kWh 98 - 115

Slow Cooker 190W 0.178kWh 0.355kWh 0.710kWh 36 – 43

PressureCooker

700W 0.164kWh 0.221kWh 0.334kWh 43 - 50

Assumptions: This analysis assumes a solar home system (SHS) equipped to cover strictly the cooking load of the household, not other appliances. A further analysis below provides an overview of the costs of a fully-equipped SHS able to power both standard appliances and

cooking. Electric and induction hot plates cycle on-and-off during their cooking period and as such do not use their full rated capacity

each hour (see graphs in Table 8 below). Appliance usage based on real field test results and reflect real electricity consumption for a

four-hour cooking period. Note that both the slow cooker and the pressure cooker are slightly below their maximum consumption (e.g.

for the slow cooker: 190 x 4 = 0.760kWh). This is due to the fact that even on high, such appliances rarely consume their full, maximum

rated capacity.

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stoves used with efficient and well-sized cooking pots.

However, in the case of solar home sys-tems, one of the most decisive factors is the system-level cost savings that can be har-nessed by scaling down the total electrical demand requirements of the solar home system. By scaling down the actual demand of the appliances used, it is possible to install a much smaller SHS, saving substan-tial amounts of money in both the solar array and battery bank required. These cost

savings translate directly into a lower cost for the end-user.

A parallel development played an important role in the off-grid solar sector in recent years: while the decline in the cost of solar panels was one aspect that made pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) solar more affordable to end-users in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, an equally important factor was the increas-ing efficiency of end-use appliances, in particular the increased efficiency of LED lighting technologies.

A similar trend is now poised to redefine the off-grid cooking sector. As the costs of solar and storage systems continue to decline worldwide, combined with the substantial savings that can be unlocked by using high-efficiency end-use appliances like

slow cookers and pressure cookers, a new economic reality is dawning: long thought of as unrealistic, even utopian, the idea of co